Inspector Bunyan languidly smothered a yawn. “My men searched the corpse for such a key, Mr Lansing.”
“Again without success?”
The inspector for the first time showed traces of irritation. “The unanimity with which all our clews have come to nothing in this case, Mr Lansing, is a strain on the official mind.”
“Skeleton keys, fiddlesticks!” I exclaimed disdainfully. “Nobody needs such a thing to enter either this room or my suite downstairs. Any fairly active person could climb in by way of the fire escape, as Mr Lansing did just now when I yelled for help.”
Stephen Lansing groaned.
“I wondered,” murmured the inspector softly, “how you happened to be on the scene so soon, Mr Lansing. Before my man Sweeney or anybody else arrived, I believe.”
“Yep,” said Stephen cheerfully, “as soon as I heard Miss Adams’ siren call I clambered right up the old fire escape to the rescue, pronto – or even quicker than that.”
“How fortunate,” said the inspector, eyeing him curiously, “that you were already wearing your street shoes.”
Stephen coloured. “I’m a bit of a night owl, Inspector. I hadn’t, as you have also noticed no doubt, removed anything except my coat.”
“Yes,” said the inspector, “I had noticed.”
“It was a mere trifle to slide into my dressing robe.”
“I dare say,” murmured the inspector. “Naturally, from our viewpoint, it’s regrettable that in your precipitate ascent you have probably destroyed all traces of whoever preceded you up the fire escape.”
“Isn’t it?” drawled Stephen with a broad grin.
The inspector strolled over to the window and stared, rather hopelessly, I thought, at the rusty iron landing of the fire escape.
“The proper entrance is from the corridor,” he observed, “but as you say, Miss Adams, any fairly active person could swing across to this window.”
With pardonable exasperation I noticed that my slip was no longer neatly draped on the railing. It had fallen down and apparently been trod on once, if not often.
“What is that thing? A tent?” inquired Inspector Bunyan, peering over my shoulder.
“That,” I replied with cold dignity, “is a piece of my wardrobe.”
“Miss Adams uses the railing of the fire escape at her convenience as a-er-washing line, Inspector,” Stephen explained.
“Up to now,” I remarked bitterly, “we have not needed a traffic officer on the fire escape.”
I made several futile efforts to reach the slip, but I could not quite make it. By leaning far out and practically standing on his head, Stephen Lansing recovered the missing article.
“It does look a little as if a herd of cattle had been driven over it,” he acknowledged.
The inspector’s eyes lighted. “Any footprints?” I wadded the slip up in my hands. “What do you think it is, a desert waste? Certainly there are no footprints.”
The inspector scowled. “Another clew gone to glory!” he muttered.
Stephen Lansing laughed, and the inspector looked from one to the other of us with a gleam in his eyes which I did not fancy.
“There is, as you may or may not know, a legal penalty for suppressing evidence,” he said in the silky voice which I was learning boded no good. “From-ah-six month’s to-ah-three years in the penitentiary.”
“I think,” Said Stephen Lansing impudently, “you’d better turn your petticoat over to the inspector, Adelaide. He seems to have ideas about it.”
I nearly dropped the object under dispute. “Adelaide!” I snorted.
He grinned. “Partners in crime should dispense with formality, don’t you think, Adelaide?”
“I suppose,” continued the inspector softly, “you didn’t lose your petticoat climbing up and down the fire escape, Miss Adams?”
I glared at him. “Evidently you have no sisters, Inspector. This is not a petticoat; it is a slip with shoulder straps. One cannot lose it without disrobing, and I assure you I neither tonight nor any other night have undressed either partially or completely on the fire escape.”
Stephen Lansing chuckled. “I wouldn’t put it past you, Adelaide, if the occasion demanded it.”
The inspector sighed. “Just the same, I think I’ll take the slip along to put with the other exhibits in the case.”
“Suit yourself,” I snapped.
The inspector turned toward the door. “I believe after this, Miss Adams, I’d keep the window next the fire escape locked. In fact, if you don’t mind, I’ll have Sweeney attend to it immediately.”
I put my nose in the air. “Still harping on my being a victim – or is it a murderess – Inspector?” I asked.
“One wonders,” he said, lifting his eyebrows.
My face stung. “I haven’t a grudge against a soul in the world, Inspector, and there is no one who either loves or hates me enough to kill me. It’s been a long time since I’ve mattered that much to anybody,” I said.
“Yes?”
“Yes!” I cried unsteadily.
The inspector shifted the bundle which was my rolled-up slip to his other hand and inquired, “Are you aware, Miss Adams, that when Kathleen Adair and her mother came to this hotel they asked to be put on your floor?”
I stared at him blankly. “The Adairs!”
Beside me Stephen Lansing seemed to freeze in his tracks.
“But I don’t know the Adairs,” I said weakly. “That is, I never saw or heard of them before they moved into the hotel a month ago.”
“Nevertheless, they specifically requested to be placed as near Miss Adelaide Adams’ suite as possible. Right, Mr Dodge?”
Pinky flushed. “Yes sir,” he said, giving me a flustered glance.
“I can’t understand it,” I protested.
“Nor I,” murmured the inspector. He turned to the door.
“Coming, Mr Lansing?”
“Directly!” sang out Stephen Lansing and then, dropping his voice to a husky whisper, he added fiercely, “For God’s sake don’t give them away!”
“But –”
“I don’t know how they’re mixed up in this, only I’d stake my life on the girl.”
“Kathleen Adair?”
“Sh!” he warned me.
The inspector had put his head back in at the door. “I found this clinging to your slip, Miss Adams. The clasp seems to have been stepped on by somebody on the fire escape. I presume it’s yours?” He was eyeing me as a cat eyes a mouse. “Or is it?” He held out a pin, a large old-fashioned gold-and-black brooch pin such as women used to wear at the neck of their frocks in my youth.
I do not know how long I stood there staring at the object in the inspector’s hand, while time unrolled its relentless curtains and I was back in a dew-drenched garden one breathless June night with passion and duty tearing my heart in two.
From a great distance I heard Stephen Lansing’s voice, still hoarse, almost desperate. “Certainly it’s her pin. Isn’t it, Adelaide?”
Our eyes met. “Yes,” I said at last very slowly, “it’s mine.”
The inspector’s lip curled. “Can you prove it, Miss Adams?” Stephen Lansing caught his breath, but my voice was steady, perfectly steady.
“Yes, Inspector, I can prove it,” I said. “Look on the back. You’ll find engraved there – you’ll find engraved there From Laurie to Adelaide.”
Stephen Lansing was staring at me incredulously, but the inspector, who had turned the pin over, sighed.
“Just so,” he said and handed the pin to me.
“God love you!” breathed Stephen Lansing and followed the others from the room, once more his smiling and debonair self.
Alone I stood for a long time, staring at the quaint piece of jewellery which the inspector had found clinging to my princess slip. It had been twenty-five years and ten months since I last saw the pin, almost half my life. A long, long time, I thought, my eyes blurred with tears. I knew then why the Adair girl from the firs
t had tugged at my heart, why something about her had at times given me a spasm of pain.
“Oh, Laurie, Laurie!” I whispered, remembering the way Kathleen had stared at James Reid in the elevator, as though she would, if she could, have stricken him dead at her feet.
8
There was a pall over the Richelieu the next morning. People had a strained look about the eyes and a tendency to keep to themselves.
No one showed an inclination to discuss the affair uppermost in all our thoughts, yet it was impossible to ignore it. To Sophie’s distress, the police had practically moved in upon us in a body. One was apt to run into a uniform in any of the corridors, to say nothing of certain strange individuals who wandered vaguely about, any one of whom might have been a new transient guest in the hotel but was more likely a plain-clothes man, snooping around to find out what he could.
“This is going to ruin me,” cried Sophie tragically. “I’ve already had a dozen notices from people who intend to move out on the first.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “After all, one doesn’t exactly court the thought of being murdered in one’s bed, to say nothing of not being able to step for fear of treading on the police force.”
“The whole’s thing’s ridiculous!” stormed Sophie. “Can we help it if a private detective chooses to get himself put on the spot in our hotel? No doubt he had scores of enemies. From what I can discover, his reputation smelled to heaven. Not for a minute do I believe our regular guests are mixed up in it.”
“According to the inspector...” I began.
“Stuff and nonsense!” snorted Sophie. “All the inspector has to go on is that telegram from the agency, and they could have told him anything. How do we know one of Reid’s own crowd didn’t follow him down here and kill him? Personally,” she declared emphatically, “I think that unknown client business is a stall of the police.”
And then she spoiled everything by adding in a strangled whisper, “It was you, wasn’t it, Adelaide, who hired that fellow to come to the Richelieu?” I stared at her and I imagine my lips curled.
“No, Sophie,” I said, “it wasn’t I. But it has occurred to me that there are a number of things you must be anxious to know about your husband, including what he was doing slinking around the fourth floor shortly before eight last night.”
“Adelaide!” protested Sophie in a horrified voice. “You can’t believe I’d set a private detective onto Cyril!”
“That’s the worst of an affair like this,” I said wearily. “It turns everybody’s hand against everyone else.”
“Yes,” said Sophie, both her chins quivering, “I suppose we’ll end up by suspecting everyone of something, if not murder.”
The inspector, in spite of his interrupted night, was on hand bright and early that morning and closeted himself behind closed doors in the parlour. From there he operated after the manner of a spider in a web. That is to say, every so often he extended a long arm in the shape of one of the uniformed policemen and brought in another fly for dissection. Sometimes he detained his victim for only a few minutes, occasionally the unhappy captive was put through a more prolonged grilling, but in every instance the subject came out of the parlour looking as if he had been run through a vacuum cleaner.
“It makes me sick,” cried Howard Warren savagely. “He proceeds to accuse you of the most impossible things, and when you deny it he merely smiles cynically and goes on to something else.”
I pursed my lips. “He seems to have acquired an astounding amount of information about us all in an incredibly brief time.”
Howard glared at Pinkney Dodge, who was slumped down in a chair between the desk and the telephone booth, staring unhappily at the floor, his eyes red-rimmed from loss of sleep. Pinky usually went to bed as soon as he was relieved by Letty Jones at seven in the morning. I supposed, like the rest of us, he was too excited to retire. Now I know he was afraid, hideously, horribly afraid, poor Pinky!
“It isn’t difficult to guess where the inspector gets his information with a male old woman camping at the switchboard,” said Howard crossly.
Pinky flinched and gave us a pleading, almost tearful look.
“He-he’s clever; he-he worms things out of you,” he admitted in a shaking voice.
I felt sorry for him; I always had. I could well imagine that Pinkney, who had been successfully browbeaten for years, was no match for the inspector or anyone else with the authority to ask questions and demand an answer.
“No one can blame you, Pinkney, for telling the truth,” I said. “The police are entitled to it.”
“Thanks, Miss Adelaide,” he said gratefully.
Howard flushed. “Pinky has no right to put his own interpretation on things which do not concern him.” He again glared at the shrinking night clerk. “What if I did ask Miss Adelaide to take in a movie with me? Maybe it was the first time I ever invited her out, and perhaps I did try to persuade her that she didn’t need a coat. That doesn’t prove I was trying, for reasons of my own, to keep her from discovering the murder.”
“Of course not,” I faltered with a sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach.
Pinkney made a little humble gesture. “I didn’t say any such thing to the inspector, Mr Warren. I swear it. If-if he put that interpretation on your conversation with Miss Adelaide, it’s his own idea.”
Howard looked a little ashamed of himself. “All right, all right,” he said. “Skip it. Only if I were you, Pinky, I’d not forget that one man has already paid with his life for dabbling in other people’s affairs in this house.”
Pinky shrank back, and his hands began to tremble. “I don’t want to make trouble for anybody and-and I can’t afford to get into trouble. My-my mother... If anything happened to me I don’t know what would become of her.”
“Nothing’s going to happen to you, Pinkney,” I said soothingly, “or to anybody else, let’s hope.”
“Yes, Miss Adelaide,” stammered Pinky without conviction.
A stocky policeman approached and stood stiffly at attention.
“The inspector would like to see you, Mr Warren, in the parlour.”
“Again!” groaned Howard and, his face set and white, turned toward the stair, kicking at a chair on his way.
There is no denying all our nerves were on edge that morning. Being forcibly detained in any one place is in itself sufficient to make the average person feverishly eager to be elsewhere, and the inspector had prepared a list which one of his henchmen passed around. The people on that list were not to leave the house until further notice. We were, or so it said, to hold ourselves in readiness for further examination by the police.
“As if we were on the chain gang!” growled Dan Mosby, pacing the lobby floor.
At least he had not been drinking. For the first time in months I was able to regard him with something like approval. In his cups he was undoubtedly a bore. Sober, he struck me as a fairly decent chap, making allowances for his obvious lack of breeding, which, as I reflected, was quite probably his parents’ fault.
His wife spent the morning, except for a brief trip to the parlour, huddled in one of the big chairs at the front of the lobby, her small common little face tragically white and absolutely expressionless except when now and then her husband paused beside her. It gave me a pang to see how hard she tried to smile up into his face, and once when he patted her shoulder she turned and laid her lips against his hand.
Neither Mary Lawson nor her niece came down to breakfast that morning. Feeling uneasy, I telephoned up to their room about ten o’clock. Polly answered in a bright flippant voice, trying to be giddy about it all, although I was sure she had been crying.
“No, Miss Adelaide, neither of us is ill. We just don’t crave food, if you know what I mean. However, after three sessions apiece with the inspector and more to come, or so he hinted, we’re having a full morning. Isn’t life just one long sweet song?”
Now I could not condone Polly Lawson’s behaviour for the past two mo
nths, but suspecting her or Mary Lawson of murder was a cat of another odour, and my voice trembled with indignation when I said so.
“The inspector is more of a fool than I took him for,” I insisted in conclusion, “if he seriously hopes to involve you and Mary in this sordid business.”
To my surprise Polly’s bravado abruptly deserted her. “I-I take b-back everything I ever said about you, Miss Adelaide,” she faltered. “You may be an old fuss-budget in prosperity, but in adversity you’re an angel.”
It was a dubious compliment; nevertheless, it touched me. “Thank you, my dear, and I quite understand why you tried to run off with that dratted knife.”
“Do you?” she whispered.
“Naturally your first thought was that, innocent as she is, being its owner, the police would be certain to think the knife implicated Mary.”
“Yes,” said Polly with a little sob.
“I should have done exactly the same thing in your place,” I said firmly.
“I bet you would at that,” she said and, after hesitating a minute, asked, “Have you seen Howard, Miss Adelaide?”
“The inspector sent for him again a few minutes ago,” I said.
“Oh!” she gasped and then added huskily, “Did you say again?”
“Isn’t it asinine?” I demanded. “I haven’t the slightest doubt that while the police are wasting precious hours, interviewing perfectly innocent people, the murderer is busy successfully covering up his tracks. No wonder the city can’t balance its budget.”
“I guess so,” said Polly in a forlorn voice.
“At least,” I went on, “the way Howard championed your cause last night did my heart good. I should be very happy, my dear, to see you two bury the hatchet or whatever it is that has spoiled love’s young dream lately.”
Polly’s voice trembled. “If I only dared!”
She hung up, to conceal her tears I was convinced, not far from tears myself. It has always seemed to me pathetic how often people hurt the ones they love. I did not know why Polly had deliberately wrecked her romance with Howard Warren, but at that moment nothing could have persuaded me that they were not in love with each other.
Murder a la Richelieu (American Queens of Crime Book 2) Page 8